Topic: “Food Safety and Quality Standards: Opportunities to Improve Efficiency”
Speaker: Roger Bont, Director, Global Quality Assurance, Cargill

Abstract
As a supplier of ingredients for food/feed processors and finished products for foodservice and retailers, we “host” too many redundant third-party food safety and quality management audits, which divert our attention from meaningful food safety improvements. To improve efficiencies, we completed a comparison of all audits against the international standard, Codex. Given the similarity between the audits’ food safety and regulatory components, and with Cargill’s excellent audit results, our strategy is to influence our customers to accept audits, which are typical in the geography and industry that our plants operate. As a result, we will be able to reduce our costs and time spent in audits as well as enabling our customers to improve their efficiencies. Assuming we are successful in getting to one audit per plant, we believe there is a $6.5 Billon USD industry savings that could be used to make food safety improvements vs “hosting” redundant audits.

As a customer, our corporate Supplier Qualification Program is based on an assessment of risks. Our business units manage their suppliers following their risk assessment criteria and have specific requirements in place to best understand the supplier’s processes, capabilities, opportunities, and partner for mutual success.

Biography
Roger Bont is currently Cargill’s Global Quality Assurance Director in their Corporate Food Safety and Regulatory Department based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He has been with Cargill for 13 years in a variety of Quality Assurance positions of increasing responsibility. In addition, he gained consumer food products experience during ten years with General Mills in several different quality assurance positions both in plants and in a corporate environment. His former employment also includes 5 years in Public Health in the State of Michigan.

Roger has a Bachelors of Science degree in Environmental Science from Grand Valley State University and a Masters of Science degree in Food Packaging from Michigan State University.<back>